Dick realized, better even than Reuben Cowder, how the sorrows that she had undertaken to relieve absorbed her. He was getting better and better acquainted with the young woman in these days, for it came to be Reuben Cowder's habit, since his first talk with Dick, to bring him regularly her letters. Sometimes he dropped into Dick's study at night, sometimes he picked him up as he drove by in his car or stopped him as he met him on the street; and always Dick found that his reason was the need he had of talking about his girl. Evidently he talked to no one else, for nobody in Sabinsport knew any of the details of the terrible experiences these months had brought Nancy Cowder or anything of the hell of torment her father had gone through. Dick himself never mentioned her name, sensing that, at the first hint the hard old man had that he had talked, his confidence would be silenced. Reuben Cowder had a terrible resentment against Sabinsport society because it misjudged his daughter. Sabinsport should never know of her from him, should not have the stupid satisfaction of rolling over her splendid service with idle tongue, and Sabinsport did not know more than that the girl had been in Serbia throughout the bitter months after the second invasion and repulse. Dick knew the tragic story in spots, and, by his knowledge of the country and his careful reading of every scrap of news the leading journals of the world gave him, had pieced it into a whole. He saved every item he read to talk over with Cowder, and every day that he built up the story he unconsciously became more deeply involved. "The courage of the creature," he said to himself; "the gentleness, the gayety, the pity--why, she's a wonder woman. Who could have guessed it from the gossip of this benighted town?" And as a truth, Nancy Cowder deserved all Dick was attributing to her. She was showing the qualities of a great, pitying, resourceful soul, naturally and quietly giving its life to ease the boundless misery of a brave and neglected little people. She had first entered the country in 1914, stirred to the undertaking by the reports of the plight of the sick and wounded after the Austro-Hungarian invasions. Things in Serbia, indeed, were in a frightful way. Exhausted by two recent wars, her hospitals, never many, stripped of supplies, her few physicians and nurses worn out by the long strain through which they had been going, the country could scarce have been in a worse condition to stand a new shock. She, to be sure, repulsed her enemy, but the repulse cost a frightful price of dead and mutilated. Who shall ever have the courage to tell of the savage cruelties that attended the retreat of the Austro-Hungarian army from Serbia in the fall of 1914? Those who followed after found men hanging in orchards, dead; women huddled in heaps where they'd been felled, the hideous first step in that decision to exterminate the Serbian people, which the Central Empires had taken.